Excerpts

Stumbled across an interesting website, Long Bets, where people place bets on long term societal and technological possibilities. . For $50 anyone can put lay out a prediction and then others can place a bet against them. One of those bets was placed between Mitchell Kapor and Ray Kurzweil who have each plonked down $10,000 on opposite sides of whether a machine will pass the Turing test by 2029. The Predictors and Bettors must provide an argument explaining why the subject of their prediction is important and why they think they will be proved right.

The following excerpt gives a brief understanding of the turing test.

The Turing Test was introduced by Alan M. Turing (1912-1954) as "the imitation game" in his 1950 article (now available online) Computing Machinery and Intelligence (Mind, Vol. 59, No. 236, pp. 433-460) which he so boldly began by the following sentence:

I propose to consider the question "Can machines think?" This should begin with definitions of the meaning of the terms "machine" and "think."

Turing Test is meant to determine if a computer program has intelligence. Quoting Turing, the original imitation game can be described as follows:

The new form of the problem can be described in terms of a game which we call the "imitation game." It is played with three people, a man (A), a woman (B), and an interrogator (C) who may be of either sex. The interrogator stays in a room apart from the other two. The object of the game for the interrogator is to determine which of the other two is the man and which is the woman. He knows them by labels X and Y, and at the end of the game he says either "X is A and Y is B" or "X is B and Y is A." The interrogator is allowed to put questions to A and B.

The toughest test of Artificial Intelligence is going to be its understanding of Irony. How is a perfectly logical machine to understand it? It is impossible to spot irony without understanding irony, and yet how could it (the A.I.) understand irony without spotting it? If you don’t recognize irony, you can’t see it, and you can’t see it if you don’t recognize it. Fowler in his classic volume Modern English Usage says, “Irony is a form of utterance that postulates a double audience, consisting of one party that, hearing, shall hear and shall not understand, and another party that, when more is meant than meets the ear, is aware both of that more and of the outsider’ incomprehension.”

The more one reads the sentence, the more one identifies with the outsider’s incomprehension. Is it possible that the very definition is ironic?!

Fame is a terminal disease. It screws you up even worse than your mom and dad. Somewhere in the late twentieth century the pursuit of fame became a way of life. Suddenly everyone wanted to be famous. Newscasters, journalists, weather men, astrologers, cooks, interns, even lawyers for God’s sake, everyone went nuts trying to grab their fifteen minutes of fame as promised by the pop philosophy of Andy Warhol. It replaced life after death as mankind’s greatest illusion. Fame! You’ll live forever. Fame! Your chance to revenge your parents. Fame! Take that, you nasty kids who were so cruel to me at school. Fame! A chance to screw yourself across the flickering face of history.

Fame, fame, fame, fame, fame.

This syphilis of the soul was caused of course by the arrival of television and the instant attention of the new mass media. If the medium was the message, then the message was crap, for the TV screens were filled from morning to night with a constant twenty-four-hour shit storm. No one was spared. Not presidents, not princes, not popes, not people’s representatives. Knickers off, panties down, coming live at you in ten, nine, eight... Kiss and tell, kiss and sell, bug your neighbors, tape your friends, grab an agent and sell, sell, sell. Intimacy? Privacy? Forget it. Notoriety? Shame? No such thing. Fame. That’s the name of the game. Private life was washed away under the tidal wave of freedom of speech. It didn’t matter whether you were famous for murdering a president or inventing a pudding, now fame could travel at the speed of light, everyone was just a sound bite from stardom.

No one remembers the name of the anarchist who started World War One by murdering the archduke in Sarajevo in 1914. Everyone remembers Lee Harvey Oswald. Fame! A rifle shot away. Providing you have television. Fame the intellectual equivalent of waving at the camera. “Look at me, Ma! I’m here. I’m real. I’m on TV.” Sad, sick, and deplorable, isn’t it? I mean in the 1990’s even agents became famous, for Christ’s sake. And what do we call the famous? Stars! I mean hello. Have we no sense of irony? Look up – look up at real stars. Billions of them? Billions and billions of the buggers. Don’t we get it? There is no fame. There is no immortality. There is no life after death. There are just millions of tiny grains of sand scraping away at each other. We’re on the planet Ozymandias, people! Look on my works ye mighty and despair! The grains of time, grinding away at our insignificance… well you get the picture. You’re intelligent. You’ve read this far atleast.

(from 'The Road to Mars' by Eric Idle)

p.s. Gavrilo Princip was the man who assasinated Archduke Franz Ferdinand in 1914.

(from 'Tristram Shandy' by Laurence Sterne)